Three New Ways to Decorate Easter Eggs

Weird, cool, natural, and glam ways to decorate Easter eggs.

Easter eggs used to involve food coloring and vinegar, and that was about it. If you were fancy, you blew the egg white and yolk out of the egg through pin holes. If you were extra fancy, you made wax resist patterns on the eggs. Never mind Faberge eggs; I'm talking about the Easter eggs that regular people made in the olden days before Hometalk.com and Pinterest.

Now, though, if there's an opportunity to do a craft bigger, better, greener, or somehow more cool, the ladies and gents of the DIY blogosphere are going to do it up. What came first? The DIY blogosphere or people gluing Epsom salts to Easter eggs to make them sparkly? Did crafters always do this stuff, but we never knew about it? Were people always building their own concrete countertops, instead of hiring concrete contractors? I want answers please.

Maybe these three methods of decorating Easter eggs are not new. However, they are new to me, and they strike me as products of the visual Web. So ladies and gents, break out the hot glue guns, Mod Podge, paint, and safety goggles, because it's time to make some super-stylish New Wave Easter eggs.

Let's start with Epson Salt Easter Eggs, since I just mentioned them. All you do here is take those neon-colored plastic eggs that come apart at the middle, coat them with glue, and roll them in Epsom salts. When they dry, they look like chewy neon-colored sour candies. Except they are totally not sour candies; they are plastic eggs covered in glue and Epsom salt. It's these kind of sleight-of-hand techniques that keep me on my toes.

The next idea for stylish Easter-eggs is Naturally Dyed Easter Eggs. Are your plates natural Terra-cotta? Do you summer in Taos? Do you purposely own only one cup, and it is a 50-year-old Mason jar? Then these Easter eggs are your jam. Get on them. All jokes aside, I actually really like the looks of these eggs, which are dyed with dyes made from vegetables. They're kind of sophisticated-looking. Of course, vegetable dyes are as old as the hills, but they went the way of the Dodo for a while when commercial food colorings became popular. They're seeing a resurgence, and you can find recipes for natural vegetable dyes on Better Homes and Gardens or on Networx.com.

Our last new old-fashioned way of making Easter eggs is DIY Dyed and Speckled Eggs. The process of making these understated glam eggs is to blow the egg innards out through a pin hole, then wash and dry the eggs. You'll then dye them blue, and once they have dried you'll put speckles on them with a gold Sharpie marker. This is obviously an involved project that takes a certain amount of precision. It's probably not the best project to do with children, although an older kid with good fine-motor control might be able to participate in the process. The eggs pictured were made by a handy (wo)man in Los Angeles (if you're reading this in syndicate, click through to the original article to see the photo; it's really cool).

Eggs have really come a long way, from shells that contain albumen and yolk, to a blog-worthy craft. Have you blogged about Easter eggs? Have you developed a brand new way of decorating them? I want to hear all about your egg crafts.